Rape claims, WikiLeaks and internet freedom

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations (Report, 8 December). Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.

Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children – he was granted bail while police investigated.

There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.

Katrin Axelsson

Women Against Rape

• The heading of John Naughton's article (Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice, 7 December) does more than introduce a rather unpleasant new adjective. In criticising governments and agencies that are trying to limit or close down the WikiLeaks operation, he seems to give the internet itself a moral superiority that it does not possess. All the internet does is allow information to be copied, disseminated and accessed at an unprecedented rate; it can offer no value judgment about the outcome. For example, the internet can allow a prospective employer to have in front of them an embarrassing photograph posted on a social network by an applicant 10 years ago. Do we say, jolly good, the more openness the better – no, we routinely advise young people to use the privacy settings and to be careful about whom they trust with personal data. Clearly this is advice some governments need to take about their own internal data.

It's too early to tell whether the present torrent of releases will have good or bad effects. But surely the question of whether we should live with WikiLeaks or close down the internet is a false dichotomy. The need for some things to be secret some of the time has not changed; the rise of the internet just makes it harder to hang on to them.

Hugh Davies

Sandhurst, Berkshire

• Congratulations on publishing Naughton's outstanding article about WikiLeaks. It refreshingly acknowledges the corruption of governments that continue unjust wars merely to save face, even after they themselves acknowledge that they can never achieve their goals. It also exposes whose side such powerful (and popular) internet sites as Amazon, Facebook, PayPal etc are on when it comes to a choice between the power elites and the people.

Jim McCluskey

Twickenham, Middlesex

• The drip, drip of the WikiLeaks revelations exposes the so-called special relationship between the US and the UK as being totally one-sided (Report, 4 December). The UK supports the US's wars with the lives of its troops and billions of pounds of treasure, and allows the US to use its Nato airbases for missions outside those for which they were originally intended. Furthermore, the UK promises to protect the US from its investigation of the Iraq war, and allows its citizens (Gary McKinnon, for example) to face being expedited to a justice system that, after conviction, will impose a much harsher sentence than what they would receive for a similar offence in the UK. Ted Heath was right in refusing to accept the concept of a special relationship between the US and the UK. A special relationship must offer advantages to both parties. This one doesn't.

George Lewis

Brackley, Northamptonshire

• The latest WikiLeaks revelations on the al-Megrahi case, if factually accurate, raise some disturbing questions (Report, 8 December). What, for instance, led the Libyan regime to think that it might achieve its objective of securing al-Megrahi's release by issuing threats against Britain? Could it have been because they had witnessed Saudi Arabia's successful bid to end the Serious Fraud Office's investigation of allegations of corruption by BAE Systems in negotiating the al-Yamamah arms deal, by issuing threats against Britain just three years before?

Professor Philip Stenning

Keele University

• Idiots, liars, racists, gangsters and torturers have human rights too; so it's deplorable that WickedLeaks should have so comprehensively abrogated these. Nonetheless, we owe Julian Assange and his source(s) an immense debt of gratitude for finally, incontrovertibly, rubbishing the purveyors of ID and DNA databases who tried to pretend that data would be secure and only accessible to those authorised and needing access, and regularly trotted out the mantra: "If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear." Well, those who've been WikiLeaked may not exactly confirm the latter ... but it's rather delicious to see it come back and bite them!